In the case of Firefox users, some discovered that the new default Windows 10 browser, which is shipped to their devices via Windows Update, sometimes imports the data from Mozilla’s application even if they don’t give their permission.
Some of these Firefox users decided to kill the initial setup process of Microsoft Edge, only to discover that despite the wizard shutting down prematurely, the browser still copied data stored by Mozilla’s browser.
Several users confirmed on reddit that this behavior happened on their computers too.
Silent data importing
“Love rebooting my computer to get treated to a forced tour of a browser I’m not going to use that I have to force close through the task manager to escape, and then finding out it’s been copying over my data from Firefox without permission,” one user explains.
“Unless you close it via task manager instead of doing the forced setup, in which case it copies your data anyway, and the worst part is most people will never know what it’s doing because they’ll never open it again. I only reopened it because I noticed it automatically signed me into the browser as it was closing and wanted to sign out before not touching it again, at which point I discovered it had already copied my Firefox data over despite the fact I didn’t go through the setup process,” someone else explains.
Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on this, so for the time being, it’s still not known why Edge imports Firefox data despite the initial wizard actually killed off manually by the user.
Users who don’t want to be offered the new Edge on Windows Update can turn to the dedicated toolkit that Microsoft released earlier this year, while removing the browser is possible by just uninstalling the update from the device.
Source: Microsoft Edge Accused of Sneakily Importing Firefox Data on Windows 10
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